Brussels, 21/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - Gianfranco Copetti, Secretary General of the European Left-Movement for the United States of Europe, has written to the president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine. He requests that the EP invite the European Commission to organise, in "close cooperation" with the Parliament, a European conference on the question of the EU's official languages and linguistic regime. This would be to establish an inventory from the legal standpoint as well as from the angle of practice in the institutions, especially the Commission but also the EIB and the European Central Bank. According to Mr Copetti, such an exercise should be repeated at regular intervals on the basis of studies and evaluations regularly updated. Mr Copetti expressed concern about the growing obstacles that the recognition of all Member State languages as official languages of the Union come up against as enlargement continues. He affirms that the aspiration of English as the "lingua franca" of the EU is encouraged by the behaviour of the Commission in its communication policy. This aberration, he said, could gradually reduce most of the national languages to a position that is "similar to that of dialects".